IESA Vision Summit 2017: The perfect storm is forming
Date: 26/02/2017
At this year's India electronics and semiconductor Association vision Summit 2017 event held in Bangalore, India, the speakers as usual highlighted the Indian electronics and semiconductor product market size, trade imbalance due to increasing electronics import, semiconductor fab delays and its role, emerging market opportunities, and praises for Indian electronics, embedded systems and semiconductor design talent.
It all started with Ravi Gururaj, President of TiE Bangalore, who had a successful stint with NASSCOM very recently. He started his keynote sharing experience of getting his Apple iPhone repaired at a cost of few hundred US$ by a repair-service provider in India, for whom it only costed a few tens of dollars for the faulty component, the repair expert replaced in the Gururaj's iPhone. This example was about India's entrepreneur talent and unique business model. In this case, repair services business model was to create bill of material component kit for Apple iPhone by disassembling a newly purchased iPhone and making high profit by using them as spares. This was also about huge service support problems for repairing laptops, smart phones and such highly integrated electronics powered systems in India.
According to him, all these years, it was a chicken and egg situation in the ESDM sector. He quoted "if we truly had a thriving ESDM Eco-system, ESDM includes component manufacturing, semiconductor fab, reasonably sized domestic market, right policies, capital , and for whatever reason, the perfect storm has not formed in the last 30 years, when the opportunity was there". "but I think the time is ripe now, I think the perfect storm is forming"
He gave the examples of US$ 400 billion electronic product market by 2020, improving infrastructure, supporting policies by both Central and State governments, and GST which make a perfect storm.
He emphasised in his talk, how IOT throws out huge opportunities to Indian start-ups , where software and embedded systems skill sets available in India can be leveraged to address the growing market and it's already happening.
